


Good Dreams are Worse than Nightmares

by The_Grodyverse



Series: Dreaming [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Crying, Drabble, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, I'm Bad At Tagging, M/M, Memory Loss, Panic, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Richie is totally fine, Totally, We miss you eddie, derry curse, losers club forgets each other again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22218622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Grodyverse/pseuds/The_Grodyverse
Summary: Richie Tozier was a minor celebrity with the incredible ability to make a living on dick jokes, so yeah you could say he had a pretty good life.Except for the dreams.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: Dreaming [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1603402
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	Good Dreams are Worse than Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> So.....I haven't written a fanfiction since about 2012 and my comeback is going to be the clown movie huh? How the hell did this happen to me. I don't even get in live action fandoms much, but the sad clown gays have taken over my life? I don't know how this happened to me? Help?  
> in case it is unclear this is post movie, set in a canon where the "Derry Curse" doesn't die with Pennywise and the losers are doomed to forget again.

Richie Tozier had a pretty good life. Actually, most people would probably say it was a great life. A few simple dickheads might even think it was the perfect life. After all he was a minor celebrity, one who basically got paid to tell dick jokes. He might not be Hollywood royalty but he got invited to late night talk shows and once in a while had a real role in a real life creative project (only some were trash). Some days he still couldn’t believe he made enough money to never want for anything by essentially being a charming asshole (debatably). Something else that appealed to those simple idiots who idolized his lifestyle was the fact men in his position tended to have access to lots of women, most vastly out of their league. Groupies, girls seeking a flash of attention, even starlets seemed to let themselves be taken in by the most pathetic of idiots as long as they were funny. Now Richie was definitely a pathetic idiot, but not an extreme one by comedian standards. In fact he might be a damn Adonis among funnymen. Therefore it would make sense he would be drowning in women hotter than would have even glanced at him before the fame. The fact these women didn’t actually exist was a minor detail. His lack of romance wasn’t really a concerted effort. He never sat down to think through why women weren't a part of his life. A “reason” didn’t haunt him, those thoughts never coming to the forefront of his mind. All he knew was that their absence didn’t feel much like an absence. It just felt normal, right. And so what if there actually was no hot girlfriend with even hotter friends to jerk off to? The illusion was the important part and he was good at it. He was witty and charismatic enough to say the shitty not-actually-his material in just the right way so people would laugh, and in return got fame, fans, and money. So yeah, he had a pretty good life.

Except for the dreams.

It wasn’t every night. He wasn’t actually sure how often, when he remembered he had them, the memories slipping down away from his conscious mind into the dark like a watching a coin fall down a well. The nights when they came were almost always normal, with him drifting into sleep casually, often helped by some whiskey. 

The main dreams were mostly flashes. Images, sounds, feelings. Blood, more than he had previously comprehended was in a human body. On his glasses, tinting his vision. The wrenching feeling of just one instant, irreparable and unfathomably terrible. An invisible hook yanking his guts far away from his body with dread. A face, a voice saying his name. Words trying to come out, feeling as if he had swallowed a plant covered in barbs, hooking themselves deep into the rings of his esophagus. His brain, in shock, protecting itself with denial, dissociation. Voices around him full of pity. His body was moving, but against his own will. Tunnel vision zooming in on just what he is leaving behind as he is dragged away. Why the fuck are these hands him? Don’t they know they have to help? Let him go, LET HIM GO. He is sure he is screaming but there is no sound, just slow motion destruction, the crumbling of a house and his hope. Finality. The blood…the blood is still there. He had promised and he had LIED. He was a traitor-

_gone, gone, gone-_

Richie wakes more violently than he knew possible, his heart pumping his body full of adrenaline, a mockery of when his ancestors spent days ready to run from a lion’s jaws at any second. As the sweat cools and tremors make their way through his body Richie wishes there was a lion. There is nothing to run from here, just the feeling of a raw hole where his heart should be. A despair so bone deep it’s physically painful, making him curl in on himself as if to hide from it. And even as the feeling something irreplaceable is gone clutches him tightly around the throat still it begin to fade. He can’t hold on to the feelings, so much so it seems like trying to keep water from evaporating off him in the hot summer sun. Soon enough he has slipped back into sleep, dreamless. By the morning nothing is left but the vague recollection of something haunting him in the night. Something that seemed so terrible in the dark twilight zone of 4 AM but now in the clarity of daylight and reality seems trivial. 

Sometimes right before succumbing to unconsciousness a moment of clarity will come, a flash of memory that he’s afraid, terrified to see the dream again. Sometimes when he wakes he begs to remember, so he can at least be prepared. So he can try to understand. So he can go to a fucking doctor and force them to give him something so strong he’ll never fucking dream again. Tears of frustration slow and dry even as he begs.

Those aren’t the only dreams though.

There is another kind that will come to him with frustrating infrequency. Deceptive things, possibly more devastating in the long run than the ones full of blood and fear. These dreams are soft and warm, safe. A cheesy song from some 60’ s girl group is playing in the background, slow enough that dancing is really just slight rocking back and forth. Because he is dancing, holding someone close and he can’t remember if he has ever done this before. They are shorter than him, sturdy in his grip. He looks down and thinks ‘ah, that’s why I’m not interested in those women’. There is no name to the face but he feels a certainty even stronger than that of his own name that he never has or ever will love someone as much as he does this person in his arms. They notice his stare and look up with a half smile, eyebrow raised, and if Richie was dumb enough to still believe in such things he might think this is how heaven feels. 

When he wakes up the heavy grief settles on him like a second blanket. He accepts slowly that this is reality, hard and sharp and bright, almost unbearable and he thinks maybe he is actually in hell. He tries to mentally grip onto the dream as hard as he can but with every beat of his heart memories collapse like that house- _what house?_ These dreams stay with him for a couple days. He admonishes himself for basically having the romance version of a wet dream. At least he thinks that’s what it was, he knows he had a dream and in that dream he felt so happy he had been moping about reality for days, which was pathetic. He was forty not fourteen. For some reason the jokes about his fake girlfriend seem even more wrong for a couple shows, but he can’t figure out why. Soon these feelings too turn into nothing but a slight whisper in the back of his mind and as he always has and always will Richie Trashmouth Tozier pushes them away, slaps on a smile and pushes on with his amazing life. And if the numbness he has felt since his vague childhood keeps growing like a limb slowly losing circulation then so be it. Ignorant to a cycle his brain refuses to remember, doomed to relive trauma he can’t understand, still the show will go on.


End file.
